Ernst Mayr

From: Wirt Atmar (atmar_at_aics-research.com)
Date: 02/05/05 

Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2005 01:25:42 -0500 (EST)

Ernst Mayr, the last of the people to have participated in the Modern
Synthesis and perhaps the greatest evolutionary biology of the 20th
Century, died this morning. I have included below an obituary, which I
consider to be very well written, from today's NY Times.

A little less than a year ago, the Museum of Natural History at Harvard
held a celebration of his centennial birthday on May 10th, although his
true birthday was July 5.

Using a new technique that we've been developing over the last several
years that allows high image & sound quality slide shows to be
transmitted over the internet at low bandwidths (telephone modem
speeds), I attended the celebration and recorded some of the talks that
were given in Mayr's honor.

Although we're technically not quite ready to release all of this
material publicly yet, you can watch the Mayr Centennary lectures now if
you wish at:

      http://aics-research.com/lectures/ernstmayr/

To watch the talks, you must first download a (currently Windows-only)
player from:

      http://aics-research.com/qcshow/

Wirt Atmar

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February 4, 2005
Ernst Mayr, 100, Premier Evolutionary Biologist
By CAROL KAESUK YOON

Dr. Ernst Mayr, the leading evolutionary biologist of the 20th century,
died on Thursday in Bedford, Mass. He was 100.

Dr. Mayr's death, in a retirement community where he had lived since
1997, was announced by his family and Harvard, where he was a faculty
member for many years.

He was known as an architect of the evolutionary or modern synthesis, an
intellectual watershed when modern evolutionary biology was born. The
synthesis, which has been described by Dr. Stephen Jay Gould of Harvard
as "one of the half-dozen major scientific achievements in our century,"
revived Darwin's theories of evolution and reconciled them with new
findings in laboratory genetics and in field work on animal populations
and diversity.

One of Dr. Mayr's most significant contributions was his persuasive
argument for the role of geography in the origin of new species, an idea
that has won virtually universal acceptance among evolutionary
theorists. He also established a philosophy of biology and founded the
field of the history of biology.

"He was the Darwin of the 20th century, the defender of the faith," said
Dr. Vassiliki Betty Smocovitis, a historian of science at the University
of Florida in Gainesville.

In a career spanning eight decades, Dr. Mayr, the Alexander Agassiz
Professor Emeritus of Zoology at Harvard, exerted a broad and powerful
influence over the field of evolutionary biology. Prolific, opinionated
and dynamic, Dr. Mayr had been a major figure and intellectual leader
since the 1940's. Setting much of the conceptual agenda for the field,
he put the focus just where Charles Darwin first placed it, on the
question of how new species originate.

Though Dr. Mayr will be best remembered for his role as a synthesizer
and promoter of evolutionary ideas, he was also an accomplished
ornithologist. In fact, it was with the sighting of a pair of very
unusual birds that Dr. Mayr's long career in biology began in 1923 at 19.

Born in Kempten, Germany, in 1904, Dr. Mayr, while still a boy, was
instructed in natural history by his father, quickly becoming a skilled
birdwatcher and naturalist. Intending to become a medical doctor like
others in his family, Dr. Mayr altered the course of his own history
when, shortly before leaving for medical school, he sighted a pair of
red-crested pochards, a species of duck that had not been seen in Europe
for 77 years.

Though he took detailed notes on the pair, he could not get anyone to
believe his sighting. Finally, he met Dr. Erwin Stresemann, then the
leading German ornithologist, who was at the Berlin Zoological Museum.
Dr. Stresemann recognized the young man's talents and invited him to
work at the museum during school holidays.

After two years of medical studies at the University of Greifswald
(chosen because it was the most interesting region for birdwatching in
Germany), Dr. Mayr, like Darwin before him, traded in a career as a
medical doctor for the study of natural history. Quickly fulfilling the
promise he had shown, he completed his doctorate at the University of
Berlin in just 16 months.

 From there Dr. Mayr went on to fulfill what he called "the greatest
ambition of my youth," heading off to the tropics. In the South Pacific,
principally New Guinea and the Solomon Islands, Dr. Mayr collected more
than 3,000 birds from 1928 to 1930.

The experience, he once said, "had an impact on my thinking that cannot
be exaggerated." For it was his detailed observations of the differences
among geographically isolated populations that contributed to Dr. Mayr's
conviction that geography played a crucial role in the origin of species.

Though Darwin titled his book "The Origin of Species," little in the
book, in fact, addresses the question of how new species arise.

Today allopatric speciation (allo, from the Greek for other, and patric,
from the Greek for fatherland) is accepted as the most common way in
which new species arise: when populations of a single species are
geographically isolated from one another, they slowly accumulate
differences until they can no longer interbreed. It was Dr. Mayr who
first convinced evolutionary biologists of the importance of allopatric
speciation with the detailed arguments in his seminal book "Systematics
and the Origin of Species."

"Organic diversity had at last received a convincing explanation," Dr.
Jerry A. Coyne, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago,
wrote of the arguments made in Dr. Mayr's book. Dr. Coyne called the
work "one of the greatest achievements of evolutionary biology."

Similarly, the most commonly held view of what constitutes a species
remains the one that Dr. Mayr promoted more than 50 years ago, known as
the biological species concept. Simply put, the concept, first
explicitly defined by Dr. Theodosius Dobzhansky, states that populations
that can successfully interbreed are the same species and those that
cannot are different species. While numerous other species concepts have
been proposed and debated, this one continues to reign supreme.

Dr. Mayr's focus on species, both their nature and origins, appears to
have derived from his experiences in the South Pacific.

When he went to New Guinea, Dr. Mayr once explained in an interview with
Omni magazine, there was a popular school of thinking known as the
nominalist school of philosophy that held that species did not, in
reality, exist. They were merely arbitrary categories, little more than
names.

"But I discovered that the very same aggregations or groupings of
individuals that the trained zoologist called separate species were
called species by the New Guinea natives," Dr. Mayr said. "I collected
137 species of birds. The natives had 136 names for these birds - they
confused only two of them. The coincidence of what Western scientists
called species and what the natives called species was so total that I
realized the species was a very real thing in nature."

Beyond the importance of his work, Dr. Mayr himself eventually became a
living symbol of the beginnings of the modern field of evolution, one of
the last survivors of a handful of biologists, including Dr. Dobzhansky
and Dr. George Gaylord Simpson, who came to be known as the architects
of the evolutionary or modern synthesis.

In the evolutionary synthesis, neo-Darwinism took its place as today's
dominant theory of evolution. Taking place between the 1920's and 50's,
the synthesis is recognized as a period of conceptual unification, a
time of "mutual education," as Dr. Mayr once described it. Laboratory
geneticists, studying mutations and population genetics, began merging
their views of evolution with those of field scientists, like Dr. Mayr,
who studied the diversity and origins of different species. New
findings, in genetics as well as other fields, were reconciled with
Darwin's theories of evolution. Competing theories, including Lamarckism
(the inheritance of acquired characteristics), were tossed aside,
producing a much more unified view of evolution at work.

Before, during and after the synthesis, over the course of a remarkably
productive career, Dr. Mayr wrote or edited 19 books and wrote more than
600 journal articles. In fact, he was more prolific after his official
retirement in 1975 (publishing more than 200 of the articles) than many
scientists are in their entire careers. He received numerous major
awards, including the National Medal of Science, the Balzan Prize and
the International Prize. He once noted that Nobel Prizes are not given
in evolutionary biology, saying, "Darwin wouldn't have won it either."

In addition, Dr. Mayr was an ardent promoter of the academic discipline
of evolutionary biology, perhaps its most energetic organizer, playing a
critical role in founding the Society for the Study of Evolution in 1946
and serving as the first editor of its journal, Evolution, still the
leading journal in the field. Yet throughout this work to define his
field with broad conceptual brushstrokes and nitty-gritty organizational
details, his birds were never forgotten.

As a collector, ornithologist and curator, first at the University of
Berlin, then the American Museum of Natural History and finally at the
Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University, Dr. Mayr made his
mark.

By the time he turned 90, in 1994, he had named more than 24 valid bird
species, more than had any other living ornithologist at the time. He
had named more than 400 subspecies and several new genera of birds as well.

Perhaps Dr. Mayr's most unusual ornithological accomplishment dates from
his earliest work as a biologist. With his having to live off the land
while on his New Guinea expeditions, every bird that was skinned for
study went into the pot. As a result, Dr. Mayr is said to have eaten
more birds of paradise than any other modern biologist.

Though he began his career with his binoculars focused on birds, Dr.
Mayr took a serious interests in numerous organisms, resulting in a
remarkable breadth of publications ranging from species delineations in
plants to hybrids formed by snail species, courtship behavior in fruit
flies and the evolution of human blood groups.

Of all his many achievements in the science of evolution, Dr. Mayr may
have taken the greatest pride in his theory of what he called peripatric
speciation and genetic revolutions, an idea he called "perhaps the most
original theory I have ever proposed." It was also his least successful.

According to the still controversial theory, new species can be produced
when very small populations are cut off from the rest of the species.
Unlike the more general theory of allopatric speciation in which
isolated populations slowly accumulate differences until they can no
longer interbreed, in peripatric speciation, extremely small
populations, isolated in unusual habitats, undergo what Dr. Mayr termed
a "genetic revolution." Undergoing drastic changes in their genome,
populations evolve quickly to become new species.

The theory has met with considerably less enthusiasm than other of his
arguments. Some scientists have said that it is unlikely, unsupported
and untestable. Others have defended the proposal of the theory, saying
that while the idea itself may not stand the test of time, it remains
significant as one of the first explicit theoretical models of
speciation and its genetic consequences.

Dr. Gould has also credited Dr. Mayr with sowing the seeds for the
"flowering of modern macroevolutionary theory."

While microevolutionary theory seeks to explain, for example, how
species adapt to particular environments or how evolution among
populations can give rise to new species, macroevolution encompasses a
much bigger picture. Macroevolutionary theories examine, for example,
how some species survive better than others and how likely or unlikely
they are to give rise to other species. It was Dr. Mayr's concept of the
species and its role in the evolutionary process, according to Dr. Gould
of Harvard, that laid the foundations for many of the theories being
tested by macroevolutionists today.

In addition to his several lifetimes worth of work in the science of
evolution, Dr. Mayr also fathered an entirely new field of study.

"He created the field of history and philosophy of biology, almost
single-handedly," said Dr. Smocovitis of the University of Florida. "By
the 1960's there was a generation of historians of science but nobody
doing history of biology. He argued for the autonomy and sovereignty of
the biological sciences, and that's when philosophers began to rush in.
His idea was, we have a brand new science here that doesn't behave like
physics and chemistry."

As with the infant discipline of modern evolutionary biology, Dr. Mayr
nurtured the new discipline of history and philosophy of biology as
organizer, mover and shaker. His own contributions to the field are
numerous, including the field-defining tome "The Growth of Biological
Thought," as well as books on the philosophy of biology, Darwin and the
evolutionary synthesis.

Dr. Mayr was also known as a man of definitive proclamations, a strong
believer in the Hegelian dialectic as a way of advancing understanding.
As a result, his pronouncements often inspired as many heated rebuttals
as nods of vigorous agreement.

Dr. Mayr is survived by two daughters, Christa Menzel of Simsbury,
Conn., and Susanne Harrison of Bedford, Mass., five grandchildren, and
10 great-grandchildren. His wife, Margarete Simon, died in 1990.

With so long to consider the great pageant of the history of life, Dr.
Mayr, in his many papers and books, seems to have taken on every subject
of interest in evolutionary biology. As a result his views were and
still are an excellent and unavoidable point at which to begin nearly
any argument of substance.

At the time of his 90th birthday in 1994, with Dr. Mayr as active and
engaged in the field as ever, Dr. Douglas J. Futuyma, an evolutionary
biologist at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, wrote, "No
one will agree with all his positions, analyses, and opinions." But he
added, "Anyone who has failed to read Mayr can hardly claim to be
educated in evolutionary biology."

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